


Cold

by jackaalope



Category: True Detective
Genre: M/M, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-09-15
Updated: 2015-04-10
Packaged: 2018-02-17 13:58:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 19,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2312096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jackaalope/pseuds/jackaalope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a collection of little shippy bits and pieces that range anywhere from fluffy to sexy to sad~</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [blackeyedblonde](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackeyedblonde/gifts), [hartcohle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hartcohle/gifts).



There were those months when he was so lonely he thought that any second now his chest would shrivel up and his lungs would sag into themselves and his heart would fold up like a fist. When he felt like a black hole, like a thing made of dark matter, sucking up everything around him into himself and putting it away God knows where, absorbing things like the idle touch of his partner’s hand on his shoulder like a sponge that never got any bigger, never got any less dry no matter how much water it soaked in. Something greedy, something filled only with compulsive and never-ending need, like the space between pockets of air in the half-second after a lightning flash. The thunder wasn’t coming. It never would. He kept falling and waiting for the inevitable shock and wreckage of hitting the ground, waiting to break inside, to hear that final snap and become something wild and primal and screaming—but he just kept falling, and falling, and falling in silence.

He didn’t want Claire back. In fact, he didn’t want anyone at all. He just wanted to stop feeling like there were shards of some smashed piece of pottery where his organs all should have been, like moving around too much might jab them into and through his skin until they poked through like fractured bones. He just wanted to stop feeling so goddamn cold every night.

It got to the point sometimes that certain colors, certain sounds, certain scents might set him off, furrow his brow and make him swallow, shift around uncomfortably: the bright fire engine red of a woman’s rain-boots on his way to work, the rasp of the Keurig machine pouring the last drips into his mug of coffee, the smell of fabric softener when he stopped by to visit the Harts’ for dinner a second time. And he’d want to melt right there on the spot, want to give in, could almost feel his knees weakening beneath him for a moment before that loneliness would snap back, draw his muscles up tight and tense again, tie the strings that held his limbs in place back onto their post in his chest. And then he’d be too miserable to even think about it. Because it was a battle, always, body and mind, the primal and the emotional.

He’d start getting hard at work, involuntarily and for no good reason, feeling that yearning deep in the core of his body that had nothing to do with loneliness, had everything to do with loneliness. At yet, alone with his back cold on the tiles of the shower wall, trying until his biceps ached, his body was about as responsive as a telephone with the lines cut. When he could manage to reach some sort of climax, it was short-lived and weak, every bit of his lust as spent as he was.

And he was tired. He was so, so tired. Sick of wading through this fog, sick of the blacks and whites of everything: dead or alive, alone or filled to the brim with love, wishing for death or happier than he’d ever been in his life. Because he never could figure out how to do things halfway.

And he waited to hit the ground for a long time, until he realized that he was just being whipped around in a long, steady circle.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was supposed to be a one-chapter kind of thing, but I decided that rather than making a gazillion different posts of different one-chapter sorts of things, I'd just stick them all here. I'm not clogging up the True Detective tag with my silly shit as much this way
> 
> Also, I guess this works with the "for @blackeyedblonde" theme anyway because she was talking today about wanting more 2012 RustxMarty. So tada! More 2012 RustxMarty. ^_^

Pop kept dead things. Kept the skulls of the deer he’d shot, some with holes right between the eyes, on the cheeks, to show where he’d just missed, where he’d been close enough. He kept them dangling from the wall on bent-up nails.

He skinned the raccoons, strung up their scraggly tails along the top of the window, the window that was mostly cardboard and duct-tape. He hollowed out that one bear all those years back and slit it down its middle, washed it out and laid it down on the floor by the fire, from where it never got up again but always stayed staring, snarling up at whoever came past with its sewed-shut eyes. There was a white rabbit stuffed with old rags up on the cabinet, its own eyes glass and glinting and sad, ears dusty. Its brother, browner and fatter, sat on the mantle, its face a little twisted. There was a fox sitting tall and wiry beside it, one foot missing. Pop’d never been very good with things after they were dead. But he did try. Tried with a sewing needle and scissors and bits of paper bags soaked in hydrogen peroxide and hands that shook back then even more than Rust’s did nowadays. He’d never been a gentle man but he’d made his own sorts of efforts. He had. And he’d loved those things, loved those animals. Loved them enough to shoot them and pull out their guts with his dirty, shivery fingers without the barest hint of disgust. Loved them enough to stitch them back up again like how they were before. Did all this because he loved them so much that he wanted to live with them. There was something good in that. Something deeper and more basic than respect.

After Sophia died, Rust never went in her room again. He didn’t go down to that end of the hallway ever again, even. Their bedroom, the bedroom that was Claire’s and his, was right there next to Sophia’s. Rust slept on the floor in the room that was both living room and kitchen, under the coffee table, his back curled up against the sofa every night until he didn’t anymore. And then Rust didn’t sleep anywhere for a very, very, very long time.

He had no pictures and he didn’t want them. Had none of her hairclips or her plastic dinosaurs or her shoes or her books with the textured pictures. He had the memory of what her voice had sounded like, had the memory of her blonde ringlets of hair curled up at the bottom of her neck, had the memory of her blue eyes—and, God, he’d never get rid of those, not ever. They looked back at him in the mirror every single fucking morning.

But you took something away from that, he’d come to realize. You took something away from that. If you didn’t think on it too much, it’d seem like nothing, but it’d hit him when the flash had suddenly come over him at the dinner table the other night—the flash of the sickening recognition (for the first time really, the first time it’d ever been more to him than just a basic fact of life, a condition you accepted and made into a part of your overall understanding of what it was to exist) the sickening recognition that someday either he or Marty was going to die. One without the other. And, no, it wouldn’t be alright. No, it wouldn’t be. You started thinking that you deserved comfort when you were comfortable for the first time, that now you’d finally made it through to the light at the end of the tunnel, that finally, _finally_ , everything had come together—and it wasn’t like that. It was just one long tunnel, everything. One long tunnel with a couple of holes poked in the top, and there was nothing you could do about it, nothing.

And if Marty died first… Goddammit, if Marty died first, he’d really do it. Suck up his fucking ego and drive out to the bayou in the middle of the night, somewhere in the woods, find a clearing where he could see the stars, find a nice patch of that soupy ground to lie down in, float for a while in that muck, and then close his eyes and wait for sleep to take him. Wait for the water to fill up his nostrils and go down into his lungs, weigh him down and hold him there at the bottom in silence. Wait for the alligators to come and strip the skin off his bones. And there was something good in that, also.

“You are so fucked-up,” Marty said when he rolled over and told him all of this, Marty’s hand sliding down to palm his ass, silken and warm, as he spoke. They were both still panting a little, a bead of sweat slipping over Rust’s collarbone.

“Ah, everybody’s fucked-up, Marty.”

“No. They’re not. Not like you.”

“Yeah.” His voice was bitter. “Guess that makes me one of a kind.”

“Anyway, what makes you think I’m going first, huh?”

Rust gave a little snort of a laugh—and that was how Marty knew, how he was comforted that, yeah, he’d been right in his thinking lately. He’d been right. Rust was better. Or Rust was getting better. He was on the way there.

“Probably right. Liver’s shot. Brain’s fried. Stomach’s all scarred up where Childress got me. So I got no reason to worry, I guess. But I can’t stop thinking about it, Marty.”

“You,” Marty growled, his thumb stilling where it had been stroking little circles on his skin, “are _such_ an asshole. You know that?”

“I do.”

“You do this to Laurie when ya’ll were together?”

“Worry about who was gonna die first? No. I never did that to Laurie. Didn’t love her enough for that.”

Marty took his hand away completely to rub at his eyes, blinding himself with blue stars.

“Aw, Christ,” he said.

“Look, Marty, if you’re—”

But his words were cut off by a little scratch in the air coming up from his lungs—a scratch that was caught by the press of lips grinding against his own, tugging them open so that the breath in their two mouths mingled, hot and sweet and familiar. Marty’s hand had slipped elsewhere, his callused palm grasping, the tip of his thumb slowly tracing the honey-brown line of wiry hair that ran down from Rust’s navel.

“God—fuck,” Rust whimpered, when his mouth broke from Marty’s, teeth traveling to his jawline, hands now clutching hard into his biceps.

“What were you saying, now?” Marty asked, played innocence dripping off every syllable.

“Hah… I don’t… remember.”

“Good,” said Marty, with a slow upward twist of his wrist. Rust’s mouth dropped open, upper lip curling into what was nearly a snarl, nails digging into Marty’s skin. “’Cause we got a whole lifetime ahead of us before you need to.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one is for @blackeyedblonde AND @karategirl448, who both are wonderful and supportive and adorable ^_^ *blows kisses at you two all the way from the other half of the country*

Stop-still traffic on the interstate. Cars sweating out mirages into the late-afternoon sun, golden light slanting down sideways onto the grass by the side of the road, a pleasant hum like a hive of placid bees in springtime along the sides of Rust’s brain. Marty at the wheel with sweating temples but no curses for the wall of cars ahead of them. Just dumbly happy sleepiness in the glass over his eyes. They’re driving home—and that word doesn’t feel foreign on Rust’s lips nowadays; doesn’t feel defensive on Marty’s. It’s just a word.

“You think they’re doing construction up there?”

“No,” says Rust. “If they were doing construction, we’d’ve moved by now. It’s an accident.”

Marty makes a noise of empathy, craning his neck in an impossible effort to see where the line of traffic begins. Somewhere along the horizon, maybe, or past that. Rust watches him for half a minute before the light on Marty’s face starts opening up into tiny cracks like the fissures in dried earth. And then Rust lets his eyes droop shut, lets his chin melt onto his fisted hand, elbow propped up on the console.  He’s tired, tired all the way down deep in his blood. His lungs are still aching steadily from all the running they did today, in little twinges of pain that come on the start of each breath, warm and sharp and nipping. Goddamn, could that motherfucker move.

The space behind his eyelids is deeply red, and silent. His mind is flat, quiet. He takes a long, rattling breath through his nose, and lets it slowly out trickle out again. And then, seemingly without any length of time in between, he’s waking up, calico dapples of just-before-sunset light dripping in through the driver’s seat window, and Marty’s hand down his pants. Probably’s been there for a little while, judging by the state of things.

He lifts his cheek from his hand slowly, static humming in his wrist, and looks down at his lap. He watches Marty’s hand move just before his chin, involuntarily, tilts up to the ceiling, taking his tailbone with it, spine curving up C-shaped, jaw shuddering.

“M-Marty,” he breathes, still half-asleep, blinking up at the fabric on the underside of the roof with heavy-lidded blue eyes. “Marty, what the fuck, man. Where… Where are we?”

“Hey, relax and enjoy, darlin’. We’re still stuck in traffic.”

“Mmm… What? You get… bored of the radio?”

“No. Just get bored without you.” Marty’s got his crinkly-eyed look on now, like some blue-eyed, beaten puppy-dog somebody’s left out in the rain. He watches Rust’s face, the muscles in his neck drawn tight, heart suddenly hammering.

“Fuckin sappy bullshit,” Rust bites out before a little exhaled gasp drags out before his teeth. “People are… _ah_. Fuck. Marty. People are gonna stare.”

“I got tinted windows.”

Rust almost laughs but finds he can’t, fingers reduced to white knuckles and bright-pink fingernails, claws on the ashtray in the door, on the cup-holder in the console, his mouth a tight line of clenched teeth and shaking lips. His toes are kneading the insides of his shoes to the rhythm of Marty’s hand. The lines of his collarbones look taut enough to snap, his muscles all drawn up stiff as hell so his hips don’t start bucking back and forth in the seat. He’ll be damned if he’s gonna make the whole car rock.

A soft little wail slips over his lips, desperate, pleading almost. He shuts his eyes and the world is reeling; the only thing left is Marty’s hand on his cock, twisting, tugging gently.

“Yeah, you like that.”

He wants to say, “I do,” but something in his throat grabs his words and twists them up into a strangle noise of vague agreement, caught halfway between pain and pure, simple adoration.

Marty laughs a little, his throat gone hoarse and dry.

“Yeah,” he rasps. “I like it too.”

Rust’s spine curves the other way suddenly, his mouth dropping open. Marty’s rhythm speeds.

“Like to _watch you_ —” he murmurs, and Rust’s gone, arching off the seat, neck draped backward over it in the space between the headrest and the seatbelt. The taste of lightning is on his tongue; thunder in his chest, shuddering out in soft whimpers over his lips. Gold claws its way up his belly.

When he returns, a good minute later, he is panting, sweating, shaking. He strips off his T-shirt immediately, cleans himself up with it, and lays back in the seat, mouth open, chest heaving. Marty wipes his hand on his jeans and slips his fingers in between Rust’s, trembling on the console.

“Well, shit,” says Rust.

And then, as if on cue, the cars in front of them begin to move.


	4. Chapter 4

Living with Rust was sometimes like living with a circus tiger, like living with something wild and dark, kept so long in a cage that it’d started to go neurotic. Because Rust was afraid of nothing; he’d stride right across the street without looking either way, walk out stark naked to get the mail with the neighbors sitting right there on their front porch, pour hydrogen peroxide into a cut he got off the lawnmower without even blinking. And yet, at the same time, Rust was afraid of everything. Strange things. Stopping at a diner for lunch could turn his eyes glassy and dull, make his fingers shake so hard they’d send a fork clattering back into his plate in a spray of bits of egg, pull little beads of sweat out from under his hairline—Marty’d never asked why. If he didn’t ask, Rust wouldn’t have to tell. But he stopped bringing him to diners after he’d figured out that pattern. It was the same thing with the smell of Sterno burners. And days when the temperature dropped below the forties. And putting any sort of pressure on his neck while they fucked. And roadkill. Though Marty thought he knew the reason for that one.

They didn’t talk about these things. They didn’t need to; they didn’t want to. Rust was functional—exhausting and nerve-wracking and halfway out of his mind, sure, but functional. He kept on. When something was hurting him, nowadays, he pulled out one of those ridiculous ledgers of his and planted himself on the porch-step and traced out the constellations and connective tissues of whatever it was with his pen, didn’t come inside until it was so dark he couldn’t see his own hands and until the butts of two packs of cigarettes were stuffed unceremoniously into the empty flower pot and until everything inside of him had come back together again. And then he was okay. Maybe he wasn’t happy, and maybe he never would be, but he was okay.

A couple years into their cohabitation, he traipsed back inside from a day spent in this way to find Marty on the couch in the living room with the TV paused and tears tracking their slow way down his face. Looked like they had been for a while, and his blue eyes were soft, soft in a similar and yet infinitely different way than they would get just after Rust pressed his lips to his.

Rust gave him a cursory glance, cocked an eyebrow, and rapped Marty’s knee with two fingers on his way to the kitchen. “You alright?” he asked, without looking at him. He opened the refrigerator, shadowed profile illuminated with its orangey light.

Marty swallowed, hard.

“Yeah,” he said. His voice was hoarse. “Yeah, I’ll be okay.”

“You want some iced tea?”

“It’s almost nine, Rust. Maybe this is why you can’t sleep. You drink so much fucking caffeine—”

“Get you some lemonade, then.”

Marty almost protested, but he found he didn’t really want to. Instead he just leaned back and watched him take out the pitcher of lemonade and pour him a glass, all sharp jawline and strong arms and graying hair lit by the streetlamp outside, knotted curls of it shoved haphazardly behind his ears where it’d fallen out of his ponytail. His expression in the glow of the refrigerator’s light as he put the pitcher back was unreadable.

He walked back over and passed him his lemonade before flopping down beside him, knees spread so one knocked against his, arms slung over the back of the couch, one almost resting across Marty’s shoulders, the other holding his own glass. Neither of them looked at the other. Marty looked into his lemonade and Rust stared hard at the paused TV.

“What’re you watching?” he asked, taking a sip and curling his lips back at the sweetness.

“ _Bridge to Terabithia_.”

“Well, what’d you pause it for? I’ll watch it with you.”

“Don’t think…” Marty said, and then had to stop and breathe because the tears were welling up in his eyes again. He took a sip of his lemonade. Rust was watching him when he looked up, eyes bright and sharp under his brow, his lips pressed together in a hard line between the scrubs of his facial hair.

“Don’t think I want to watch the rest,” Marty finished, Rust’s quiet focus anchoring him, steadying him. “Sad fucking movie.”

Rust looked away. He picked up the remote on the table, clicked off the TV with it, and tossed it onto the armchair.

“Good,” he said, returning and setting his glass on the table, coasterless. “Because I could really use your full attention right now.”

And he pulled up sideways onto one hip, taking Marty’s face by both cheeks, and kissed him, deeply and hungrily, his heart thrumming in the joints of his strong fingers where they settled along the bones of Marty’s jaw. His thumbs swiped gently under his eyes, brushing away the remnants of tears and, when he pulled away for a moment, it was only to swing his knee across Marty’s lap and straddle him, his open mouth coming right back to where it started. And he was all the musk of cigarettes and sweat and iced tea and the warmth of muscle rolling under soft skin and the sound of harsh breath and a beating heart. Marty slipped his hands under Rust’s undershirt and ran his palms down his sides, feeling him shudder like a fly-bitten horse beneath him.

He ran his nose up Marty’s cheek and put his tongue in the curve of his ear.

“Can’t stand seeing you cry,” he said, and his voice was hot and sticky and gravelly. “Like trying to watch it rain on the surface of the fucking sun.”

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Four very different Halloweens in Rust's life.
> 
> The costumes were 100% @blackeyedblonde's fucking AMAZING idea

They were all howling around him, yowling and yipping and flinging up caterwauls of vague, unfounded distress at the night sky, but Rust was holding on firmly to what he figured was reality and he knew that if he tilted his head back and spilled up a cry to the moon, he’d never get his voice back. His arms were stapled to his sides with invisible ropes. He trod along behind them, blinking and glowing-eyed and unsteady, his bare feet bruised, the usually-sturdy knees under his jeans feeling as weak as a child’s who had fallen asleep in the car and woken to find she had to walk inside with no parents’ arms to carry her in—

Ginger was saying something to Crash and Crash was saying something back but God be damned if Rust knew what it was. The moon was a hole in the sky, a glowing nightlight for a bedful of tiny monsters. His feet were cold and they hurt. The night was muttering to itself, wisping through the trees in little whirlpooling streams of unconsciousness, as if there were dark matter here on earth too, and if you peeked behind it, you’d find something deeper back there, something lonely and untouched for centuries. Broken toys in the attic.

Somebody stopped up here so Crash stopped too. Rust couldn’t—Rust was everywhere all at once. But Crash stopped and sat down on the log, slimy surface under his hands and his wolf’s eyes trained on the fire, cold and hard and just barely intelligent enough to follow orders. He was a good, new tire on an eighteen-wheeler. Ginger passed him—a marshmallow? A fucking marshmallow. And Crash laughed and passed the bag and put it on a stick, held it into the fire and watched.

Rust thought that looked like skin while it burned.

 

The kitchen was filled with the hot, gluey smell of Shrinky-Dinks.

He was twenty-six years old, and he was sketching the outline of a jack-o-lantern with a felt-tip pen on foggily transparent paper. She was coloring in the ghost he’d drawn minutes earlier, filling it with pink and blue—“For cotton candy,” she’d said, and Rust hadn’t questioned her two-year-old’s logic because it made good enough sense to him.  

“So what kind of candy you gonna pick up tonight, Sophia? What do you think, huh?”

She thought about that for a long moment, putting down her colored pencil and scrunching up her mouth in that way that was just so _Claire_ that Rust almost wanted to laugh.

“Reese’s Peanuts,” she said, firmly, and picked up her pencil again to resume making a colorful mess of Rust’s ghost.

“Reese’s Peanuts,” Rust repeated, doodling a tiny swirl on the top of his jack-o-lantern’s stem. “You thinking of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups?”

She nodded, stoically, twice.

“Mmm. I like those. Yeah. And what about… lollypops? You gonna get some of those, too?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Yeah. Lollypops sound good. And Hershey Kisses? What about Hershey Kisses?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And what about candy apples?”

She looked up at him and wrinkled up her nose.

Rust passed her his jack-o-lantern. She switched it out carelessly with her ghost.

“You want me to cut out the ghost and put him in the oven?”

Frozen halfway in her grab for the orange pencil, her mouth puckered up in irritation.

“I wanna do it.”

“Sure,” said Rust, passing her the tiny, round-toothed scissors. “But you gotta remember what I told you about keeping the paper on the table and cutting with _two hands_. We understand each other?”

“Mm-hm.”

 

The knife was slathered with the greenish-grey color of fish guts. The air tasted like the sun had gone quiet, the waves slapping up against the sides of the boat in steady rhythm like the breath of something huger and darker than itself even, everything all peppered with flecks of salt and kelp and blood. You learned how to breathe differently out here, how to breathe around the cold and the smell of unwashed clothes and the icy dampness of the air. How to breathe like the strange breed of people who populated this dream breathed—all of them learned that, Rust suspected, each thinking the same thing of the others. When, it reality, it wasn’t you, and then everybody else. It was just you. And him, who was another you. And him, another you. And her, another. And him, another. And so on.

You worked until it was too dark to see, and then you wiped your knife, as Rust was doing now, and then the night boys came out from under the deck and ya’ll switched places. And then you fucked off and did something—and most people slept—until daybreak, and then you did it again.

The ocean waves kept rolling, and the bitter air kept streaming on past, and the flag up above kept clattering its chain against its post, and Rust nodded at his replacement and went downstairs with his workboots clomping on the wood. It wasn’t bright down there, but it wasn’t dark, either. The boys all had little lamps. Rust did not have a lamp. He had half a carton of cigarettes; he had six full handles of shit tequila and one half-empty one; he had a sub-zero sleeping bag. That was it, because he’d given up on reading. It woke him up too far.

He didn’t bother eating dinner. He just lay down, fully clothed and covered in fish’s guts, zipped himself up inside of his sleeping bag, turned his face to the wall, and shut his eyes against the light of their lamps.

 

“Kid,” said Marty, thumbing his beltloops and turning, stiff-legged in his boots, away from the mirror to give Rust a hard-eyed stare. “There’s something I oughtta tell you.”

Rust glanced him up and down with a look of waning tolerance on his face. He wrinkled up his nose. He looked at himself over Marty’s shoulder in the mirror, black felt hat casting a pool of shadow onto his face.

“Marty, what… what’re we doin’. Here. This. This is fuckin’ ridiculous.”

“I never shot a man before,” Marty went on, grinning now, taking him by the shoulders so abruptly that Rust’s hands came up and grabbed his wrists on reflex. His eyes skimmed over Marty’s, caught halfway between mocking and just plain tired.

“You’re a moron.”

“Nope,” said Marty, leaning forward to press a kiss onto his lips under the brims of their hats. “Just a good old American man celebrating a good old American holiday by… what was it? ‘Scraping tradition out like marrow out of the bones of paganism and… commoditizing it to suit the human lust for possession’. Or something along those lines. That’s all I’m tryna do here.”

Rust stared at him, sleepy-eyed, for a long moment before he clapped him on the bicep and nodded, taking half a step away to finish tucking his shirt into his slacks.

“I’m not answering the door, Marty. All those fucking kids—”

“Course not. Just didn’t want to dress up all by myself was all.”

Their eyes met in the mirror, Marty standing just behind Rust’s shoulder, the small smile on his face so effortless and utterly revealing that Rust, looking up from under his brow and the brim of his hat, felt a gentle pang of bright warmth spread through his chest. A strange, silent moment passed, both holding one another gaze and not wanting to look away, not wanting that second to end. And then Marty was settling his hand on one of Rust’s hips, curling his ring finger through his belt loop and tugging gently until he turned, pulled forward by that finger until their bodies were pressed up together, hands on one another’s waists.

Marty pushed forward a little.

“Hey, Kid,” he said, his face twisting up hard and flinty-eyed again. “You wanna saddle up our horses and go for a ride?”

“So you aiming to talk dirty like a cowboy to me all night?”

“Hear that bank’s just filled with loot, Kid. Just filled with… booty.”

“Oh, fucking Christ.” But the curls of a smile were tugging at his lips as he leaned forward and brushed them against Marty’s. And, God, Marty was already hard, his groin fit right up against Rust’s thigh, his hands brushing down onto Rust’s ass, grabbing and needy. So that was that. Their mouths moved together, moved apart, and back again almost desperately until Rust reached down and began undoing Marty’s belt buckle.

And then the doorbell rang.

They froze, locked together.

“Ignore it.”

“No, no, I can’t do that. I—where did you put my hat?”

“Who gives a fuck, Marty?”

“Oh, I found it. I found it. Don’t worry.”

“Wasn’t.”

“Good. Got it. Alright.” Marty cleared his throat, adjusted his waistband in the mirror and nodded once at his reflection. “Here we go.”

As he was passing through the doorway of the bedroom, Rust muttered, “Good luck, Butch.”

Marty spun around. He blinked. Rust looked at him.

A grin broke out over Marty’s face, all his crooked teeth, all his crow’s feet, all his happiness.

“I love you,” he said. And then he rapped the doorframe once and was gone.

Rust waited a moment, considering. Then—

“Hell of a time to tell me,” he called out after him.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm on a writing binge these past few days idk idk sorry to post so much of my stuff all at once

Couldn’t catch a decent night of sleep. It became a joke between them. Half the time Marty’d be twisting around, shouting, and Rust would shake him awake, goad and kiss him out of embarrassment; half the time Rust’d be up and pacing the hallway until Marty got up and sat with him in the living room out of frustration, the light burning into the early hours of the morning when they both had melted into one another’s shoulders and dozed off into a space more comfortably warm than any sleep they got while trying for it. Maybe one night a week went undisturbed. That was the most they got, between the two of them.

Rust didn’t ask Marty what he dreamed about—he knew well enough—and Marty didn’t ask Rust what all the pacing was for. They just went on side-by-side, silently, trooping onwards towards wherever they were headed these days. Because it got better. It really did. And then it got worse. And then better again. As always. And then worse again. (As always.) And they were both learning, slowly, to anticipate that.

Rust caught Marty crying more than once. The man liked to pretend that he didn’t, like somehow his tear ducts weren’t connected to his eye balls like every other fucking human being on Earth, but they both knew better. The first time, Rust discovered him sitting on the edge of their bed, looking out the window with fat tears tracking their way down his cheeks to mingle with the early-morning stubble there, staring silently and passively off into nothing. And when he’d looked over to find Rust standing in the doorway, he’d turned his face back hurriedly and wiped those tears away with the back of his wrist. It’d been too late, though.

How did you cheer Marty up? You fucked him, or you let him fuck you, hard and fast and rough. And then, sweaty and panting and muscles gone limp with exhaustion, you suggested it was time for lunch, and you didn’t put clothes on while you both set about making sandwiches. That was how you cheered Marty up.

Cheering Rust up was different, both harder and simpler at the same time.

Marty came home one night and found him snoring on the couch, an emptied bottle of Nyquil on the coffee table. Something like, “Holy fucking shit,” came out of Marty’s mouth and he was knelt down on the carpet in an instant, his hands wrapped around the sides of Rust’s face. All Rust did was snore until Marty gave him a little shake. An then his eyelids unstuck a little, dragging sleepily open, unfocused, and his snore caught in his throat.

“Rust.”

“Mm.”

Marty swallowed, hard.

“Come on to bed,” he said. And Rust, limp as rags, let Marty sit him up and tug his arm over his shoulders. He swayed against him as they stood together, Marty taking most of his weight, and they stumbled down the hall to bed.

Marty lay beside him, a big spoon, all night, his hand under Rust’s shirt, pressed up soft against his ribcage where his heart still beat inside.

And that was how you cheered Rust up. You didn’t ignore him.

Couldn’t catch a decent night of sleep between them. It was easiest on the nights when they discarded their embarrassment and slept curled up together like two kittens in a basket, warm, breathing against one another. Their legs carelessly interlocked, Rust’s forehead pressed to Marty’s chest, a blonde-haired arm thrown idly over his torso. They fit like that well, like they’d been cut out right for each other—though no caring god would have made a pair so lost and hell-bound as they were, together, the blind leading the blind. But there you had it.

And it got better, and then it got worse. But it always did get better again.


	7. Thanksgiving

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't actually know what Ted looks like, even though he was in the show, because I've only seen the show twice. So I kinda made up my own Ted.
> 
> Same universe as Clockwise and Ghosts--as always in this collection of ficlets, but it's particularly relevant here.
> 
> Written initially for the Holiday Challenge on truedetectiveprompts.tumblr.com, given up on, but finished today because last night I had this bizarre dream in which I was smoking with Audrey??? Don't know where that came from. IT WAS A SIGN TO MAKE ME FINISH lmao
> 
> I literally wrote at least six pages of this today, and hardly edited it, so it might be absolutely horrible but c'est la vie. Very dialogue-heavy, I'm afraid. And I'm not very good at dialogue. BUT ANYWAY HOPE IT'S DECENT-ISH ENOUGH<333

Maggie didn’t know what she was expecting when she called Marty for the first time in months and Rust picked up the phone. It was seven a.m. and she was caught between the graveyard shift and a couple quick hours’ sleep before she had to go in again, but she recognized his voice immediately, low and soft and gravelly.

“Morning, Maggie,” he said when he picked up, and there was a short silence on the other end of the line before she found the voice to ask, “Rust?”

“Yeah. Marty’s still asleep. Why’re you calling here?”

Another silence.

“Why doesn’t he call me back sometime tonight. I’ll be home around ten.”

“I’ll let him know.”

“Rust, I—” Maggie said right on the heels of his sentence, and then stopped; he could almost hear the furrow in her brow, the downturned sides of her mouth. “I thought for sure you’d headed back to Alaska.”

He knew what she meant by that. He heard the question that she was too afraid to ask in the hesitation in her voice. So he answered it.

“Needed a little help collecting myself,” he said. “And Marty offered.”

She was quiet for a long moment.

“You know, Rust, I called to ask Marty over for Thanksgiving dinner. And if you wanted to come too… Well, I’d like that.”

Something stirred in the pit of his belly, then, worming its way up into his chest and binding up his lungs. His muscles grew suddenly a shade warmer.

“Tell Marty to call you back,” he said, and hung the phone back up on the wall.

 

 

 Marty coughed, choked, and spit a mouthful of coffee onto his empty-except-for-crumbs plate when Rust told him.

“She did _what_ now?” he spluttered, when he could speak again, swiping at his nose and lips with his arm, shoving back his chair to get up and get a paper towel. He stood by the sink framed by light, spreading his arms to look down at the dark patch on his shirt. Rust watched him for a long moment. He dipped his index finger into his hot coffee, chased a bubble along the rim, and then took it out again, wiping it on the inside of the breast pocket of his shirt.

“You gonna go?” he asked without looking at him.

“Shit. I dunno.”

Rust palmed the box of cigarettes off the table, shook another one out and put in gently in his teeth. The lighter slipped twice before it caught, Marty’s eyes fixed on the linoleum as he listened to him inhale.

“You _should_ ,” he said, voice caught up with breath, before he blew out a thin stream of smoke to the ceiling. He cocked an elbow up on the back of his chair and lowered his face by the chin back to Marty, sleepy eyes alert.

“Wasn’t asking for your advice.”

“Wasn’t offering. It’s not advice. Goddamn fact of life, Marty. Man should see his kids.”

And Marty let out a whoosh of a sigh, tossing the crumpled paper towels into the garbage and clapping his palms on his thighs as he leaned back against the sink. There was that stiffness rising in his shoulders, the twitchy line of his jaw working.

“So… what? You think I’m not trying here? You think I don’t want to see them?”

Rust took a long drag, eyes crinkling up hard and steely by his tear ducts.

“Look, you want my honest opinion?”

“Sure, Rust. Sure. Lay it _all_ on me.”

“Think you’re being a fucking coward,” Rust said, and Marty’s jowls drew up.

“Say that again.”

“I said—” And he sucked in on his cigarette his cigarette while Marty fumed and reddened. “—I think you’re a fucking coward.”

“You think you… You don’t fucking understand what I’ve been through, what I’m going through, what my whole family—”

“Look, Marty, I don’t have a family, okay, not anymore. But if I did, if I _still_ did, I sure as shit wouldn’t be treating them anything like you treat yours.”

A strange spasm of expressions ran over Marty’s face, then, and he stood there, still, for a moment, thinking. The little red numbers on the stove clicked as they changed over to a new hour. Then he reached forward, awkwardly, and knocked Rust on his bony shoulder.

“I’ll… call her back.”

Rust snorted a little, took another pull on his cigarette.

“Yeah. S’what I thought.”

 

“That what you’re wearing?”

Marty flicked his eyes over to Rust’s reflection behind him in the mirror, his forehead crinkling up in confused irritation. He plucked at the stomach of the sweater-vest—plaid, with streaks of fire-engine red and yellow and brown—with two fingers of each hand and looked down at it, looked up at the mirror again, twisting slightly to see it on an angle. And he straightened the collar of the shirt—orange as a tangerine—that he had on underneath it.

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Didn’t say anything was wrong with it,” Rust muttered, glancing down at the carpet and glancing up again, meeting Marty’s now-offended eyes in the mirror for a moment before looking away.

“Yeah, but you… you’re insinuating.”

Rust sat down on the edge of the bed.

“You really don’t like it?”

“Look like a fucking crossing guard.”

“It’s _autumnal_. Festive. You know. Little holiday spirit?”

“Holiday spirit,” Rust hummed, avoiding Marty’s eyes by reaching for his packet of cigarettes as the other man turned to look at him. “You know, personally, I can’t think of too much to warrant the foundation, or I guess now the continuation, of what’s at its core a holiday steeped in death and disease. Unless you’re also on-board with mass genocide, the extolment of Christian values, the invention of manifest destiny, the illusion of choice presented within the scam of the American market…”

“Turkey,” Marty pointed out.

Rust grunted. He lit his cigarette.

“Anyway,” said Marty, re-straightening his collar in the mirror. “Don’t see what my sweater’s got to do with it.”

 

They drove most of the way in silence save for a small, playful squabble over the radio, which Marty had set on a mariachi station and gradually increased in volume until the sounds of trumpets were rattling the windows, at which point Rust had sprung half-grinning from his curled-up position at the passenger’s window to get his hands on the knobs and change it.

Marty knew the way to that house like geese knew their way to the south, but only in the winter; like magnets knew their way to metal, but only if you turned them around a certain way. He missed his girls. But when he pulled up in the driveway there was a shard of something cold and rough-edged in the middle of his throat.

Rust’s fingertips caught the corner of his elbow as he unbuckled his seatbelt, and he looked around to find a pair of blue eyes watching him, gentler than they usually were. And he met them, and nodded once, and the hand fell away and a second later they were closing the car doors. That walk up the porch stairs felt longer than any walk he’d taken in a while; standing at the door after he’d pushed the bell, Rust at his shoulder, felt even longer.

And then Maisie opened the door. The smell of cooking spilled out over their faces.

“Hey,” she said, the greeting drawn out and teased up with a smile, and if Rust hadn’t been hanging around her father so long, he might have thought that she was completely pleased to see them. As it was, though, he saw Marty hanging around the corners of her eyes, saw the nervousness in them, the distaste, and he felt his chest lock tight with acceptance that this wasn’t going to be anything simple.

“Hey,” said Marty, in the same way, and reached down to give her a hug. She closed her eyes over his shoulder, squeezed them shut theatrically. It was for Rust’s benefit, he knew.

“Good of you to come, Rust,” she said, when they broke apart, and reached her arms to him. He took her in his own, gingerly, for a moment, patted her back once, and stepped away.

“Real—” And he had to clear his throat. “Real nice of y’all to invite me.”

He closed the door behind him, suddenly hyperaware of the shadows under his eyes, the nerves that still twitched in his fingers, the hollows under his cheekbones, deepened even further by the past three months. And there was almost a blush on his skin. His eyes were quiet metal. They might have noticed, or they might not have.

“Well, let me take your coats.”

They followed her into the living room, where there was a very bald man sitting in the armchair. He looked up as they came in, let his face break out into an easy smile.

Maggie, in the kitchen, turned, peering out over the divide between her and the living room. Marty’s eyes flicked over her.

“Oh!” she said. “You’re here. Be out in a minute.” And she jutted her head at the goop clinging to her fingers, explaining, as the man in the armchair scrambled to his feet, gathering a well in shape body up beneath him, crossed the room in a cheerful bound in his Nikes, and stuck out a hand for Marty.

“Pleasure to meet you, absolute pleasure.” Northern accent. Gentle voice. Sincere.

“Dad, this is Ted.”

Marty didn’t take his eyes away from Ted’s face. Marty’s chin was jutting. And he was a good five or six inches taller.

“I know who he is.”

“Maggie’s told me so much about you. All good things, of course.”

“Haven’t heard a word.”

Ted laughed, rubbing his palms together as they broke the handshake. He was still for a moment, like a deer before the shot, and then with birdlike rapidity, maneuvered sideways past Marty, over his shoulder. Marty turned to watch him, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his jeans, jaw working.

“And you must be Rust. Pleasure, pleasure.”

“Real nice to meet you, Ted.”

When Ted stepped back, it was with a bounce, a tuft of what remained of his thinning hair bouncing enthusiastically. He looked at them for a moment with wide eyes before Maggie stepped in, wiping freshly-washed hands on her apron.

“Good to see you both,” she said, nodding. She folded her arms.

“Hey, Mags,” Marty said, quietly, and nearly went in for a hug before he seemed to think the better of it, and instead patted her uncomfortably on the elbow. She nodded again. Rust said nothing.

A moment of silence.

Then Ted sprung back into animation.

“Well, I’m watching the game, and you’re both welcome to join,” he laughed, clapping Rust’s shoulder. Rust started. Ted seemed not to notice. “Can I get you some beers?”

“No,” said Marty, a little too forcefully, and Ted’s smile wavered a little before Rust stepped forward.

“Maggie, let me help you out in the kitchen. Marty,” he intoned, shooting him with a blank-eyed look, “Sit down and watch the game.”

“Sounds fine, Rust,” Marty said. It was very nearly a growl.

And Maggie pressed her lips together in a wan smile and strode back into the kitchen, Rust following her wake with his hands in his pockets. Marty plopped down in the armchair. Ted went lightly over to the couch.

Rust peered in the sink. “Huh. Wow. Gotta be a twenty pound turkey.”

“Seventeen,” Maggie said.

“Seventeen pounds. Wow. Imagine that. Seventeen pound bird. We keep breeding these fucking things and filling ‘em so full of those hormones, they’re gonna be bigger than us in a couple generations.”

The corner of her mouth quirked up in what was the faintest hint of a smile.

“You’re no good at small talk, Rust.”

“No,” he agreed, the creases around his eyes turning up ever-so-slightly.

A long moment passed as she re-memorized his face, compared it to the one in the back of her mind.

“You look good,” she said. “Better.”

“You’re just being nice,” he said, running his finger around the edge of the sink, watching it. “But I appreciate it. You always look good yourself, Maggie.”

She laughed a little, shook her head.

“Come help me make these crescent rolls.”

 

Maggie sat herself down at the head of the table before she called out that it was time for dinner, which Rust had to agree was a good idea. He placed himself quietly at the foot with a glass of cider and the last serving bowl of corn before Marty and Ted came trooping in, Marty stone-faced and Ted still grinning pleasantly. Maisie followed, settling her napkin into her lap as she filled in the spot on her mother’s right side, and Audrey slipped in behind her. Marty sat down heavily to Rust’s left. Ted sat on Maggie’s left. Audrey filled in the last spot with her head lowered, clearing her throat—and Rust would have thought nothing of it if her father didn’t do the exact same damn thing when he was uncomfortable.

The girls had grown, he reflected. He’d seen their pictures, had a vague, morphine-fogged memory of them stopping by at the hospital, but now he saw them clearly and, shit, they were old. As polite and pretty and sharp-eyed as their mother. Maisie projected as sure of an image of herself as her father. Audrey was quieter, cagier, though still the ghost of Marty lingered around her face, in the corners of her mouth and eyes.

“Should we say grace?” Marty asked, loudly, once everyone had sat down.

“No,” said Maggie, and reached for the filling.

They ate in near silence. Marty spoke through mouthfuls of turkey several times to ask the girls about school, Maisie’s cheerleading, Audrey’s love life (which she irritably dismissed). Ted told a funny story about his boss at work, and nobody laughed but Maisie. And that was that. They made it through.

At the end of the meal, Marty pushed his chair back, tilted his face up to the ceiling, and put a hand to his belly where it strained at the fabric of that horrible vest. Both Maggie’s and Rust’s plates, neither of which had been particularly full to begin with, were clear. Ted gave up working on a turkey leg. Maisie stopped pushing around her food. And Audrey nibbled on a crescent roll, her eyes still fixed on the tablecloth.

“Maggie, you are as good a cook as ever,” Marty proclaimed.

“Is that really a compliment?” Maggie asked, and Audrey nearly choked.

“Who’s ready for desert?” Maisie crowed, standing up and brushing off her lap. “I baked two apple pies.”

“Oh God,” Marty pleaded, settling his other hand on his stomach and rolling his eyes back up to the ceiling. “Please no more.”

“Oh, you’ve gotta try her apple pie,” Ted told him, smiling. “Maisie’s baking is to die for.”

The line of Marty’s jaw tightened.

“I know it is,” he said, tilting his head at him so fast his neck cracked. And he didn’t take his eyes off Ted as he added, “Maisie, cut me a slice of that pie.”

“’Course, Dad,” she agreed. Marty’s eyes widened in victory.

They finished off almost a pie and a half before they collectively gave up, and almost instantly, Maggie was up, collecting the dishes, Rust and Maisie standing instinctively to help her. Ted and Marty trailed off back into the living room, and Audrey disappeared like a housecat.

“No, no, Rust, you go sit down,” Maggie told him, and there was a hint of suggestion in her eyes, so he nodded and went off to diffuse the rising storm building in the living room. It was like you could feel the lightning getting ready to crack in there. Marty was still in Ted’s armchair.

Rust went and sat down next to Ted.

“So what’d your boss say after you spilled your coffee all down his shirt?” he asked.

Ted turned to him with a look of half-disguised relief.

“He said, ‘Thank God. My wife bought me this tie and I’ve had to wear it ever since.’”

Rust’s laugh echoed all the way out to the kitchen.

 

Marty was asleep as soon as he let his eyes sink shut under the weight of their dinner. Rust listened to him breathe those deep, easy, familiar half-snores of his with a vacuum ache of loneliness in his chest that he hardly cared to admit to even inside of his own head. There was too much air, too much clean white carpet, too much empty space between their beds. Maggie had put them up in the girls' old room. He watched the lights on the ceiling as late-night cars passed by on the road. He shut his eyes, and opened them. He took his pulse, and found it slow and quiet.

Eventually he got up to take a piss, or to get a glass of water, or to stretch his legs. It didn’t matter.

He walked like a ghost into the bathroom, shut the door, didn’t turn the lights on. When he came out, he drifted into the kitchen. He saw the bottles of wine in the glass cabinets, called himself a harsh name in his head, got a glass of water, and walked out. He went into the living room.

Through the window, there was a faint point of orange light in the yard. For a long moment, he watched it splutter and flare with his head tilted to one side, then he sucked in a breath, stepped back into the kitchen, put his glass in the sink and padded into the mud room. He went out through the back door in his bare feet; shut it quietly behind him. The grass was soft and cool, whooshed underneath him, and made the light go out.

He stopped.

“Just me, Audrey.”

There was a short silence, in which the sensation of eyes flitted over him.

“Oh, I thought you were Ted.”

“You mind if I join you?”

There was a slight hesitation before she said, “No. Come on ahead,” and patted the grass beside her. He dropped down to his knees silently, and stretched out his long legs beneath him. She watched his face, gaunt in the porch light. Almost even tireder now than when she’d last seen him on the news: black eyed with three-day-old whiskers. Softer, though. Gentler. And the Rust she’d known all those years ago wouldn’t have come out and sat down next to her on the grass. Never. Not in a million years.

“Stars are bright here,” he said.

And she said, “Yeah,” still watching his face, the glint in his skyward eyes going out as the motion sensor on the porch light turned itself back off. Then, hesitant, she turned her face back upward to see what he was seeing. They _were_ bright. And cold and white and motionless and far away.

Rust was a half-stranger nowadays. He hadn’t always been. Well, he had been, but he hadn’t. He’d always been distant; he’d always been close. He’d been Mr. Cohle; she’d thought of him as Rust. He’d brought her bright-colored gel pens once when she was younger. He’d re-done her ponytail while Maggie’s hands were covered in cookie dough. He’d sat on the lawn with her and her dad, and he’d told her to go pick clover flowers, and then—by some miracle—his big rough hands had turned them into two little crowns for her and Maisie. He’d never talked much.

He was different now. But so was she. So it was okay, though, maybe.

“How come you’re up?” she asked, and then half-wished that she hadn’t.

“Ain’t much for sleeping,” he told her without looking at her, and she didn’t know what he meant. “Why’re you?” And then he did look at her.

“The same.”

He hummed a little in the back of his throat, turned his face back up.

“You mind lending me a cigarette? Left mine inside.”

She almost laughed. She did blush.

“I don’t, uh… I don’t have any…. cigarettes.”

His blue eyes flicked back over to her, slowly creased up into the tiniest of smiles.

“Wondered why you put it out,” he said. He rubbed his chin, looked back up. Cleared his throat. “Well, I ain’t a cop. Don’t worry none on my account.”

“I wasn’t.”

They sat in warm, if slightly awkward, silence for a moment before Audrey lifted her hand from where it sat in the grass and brought with it, shyly, a glass piece, round and glinting blue in the light. Rust almost had to restrain a snort of laughter at the way her mouth twisted up in a nervous little grimace at being caught, wanted to inform her of exactly who she was sitting next to, but he didn’t.

She glanced at him as she settled her thumb over the hole and picked up the lighter from the grass beside her, put it to her lips and lit it. And, then without exhaling, she looked over nervously, bit her lip, and offered it over. He replaced her thumb with his. And that was that.

“How’s the holiday break been treating you?” he asked, quietly, after blowing a thick stream of smoke up to the stars without a single hitch in his breath. Audrey had to admit it was impressive.

She snorted through her nose in response.

“You don’t like Ted.” It wasn’t a question.

“He’s a fucking Ken doll.”

Rust’s eyes got heavier in thought as he took her lighter and re-lit, passed it back over once he’d taken a share.

“Your mother seems happy enough,” he said a minute later on the exhale.

She followed. “She is. I think.” And then, “It’s hard to tell.”

“The people who get the most hurt later on either show it an awful lot or not at all,” he murmured. “Pushes people away or tries to draw them nearer. Believe your mother’s the second type.”

Audrey thought about this for a minute.

“I don’t think you’re right about that,” she told him. “Not always, anyway.”

“Nothing’s an always.” He ran his hands over his thighs. “If things were ever always, an always would be less true than it is.”

And that made her laugh, spluttering smoke out her nose.

“Three hits and you’re already talking like this.”

“Nah,” he said, taking it as she passed it to him. “I’m always talking like this.” He drew in, waited. He shut his eyes and exhaled. “Drives your father halfway crazy.”

And they were quiet for some time after that. The bowl was burned all down to black crumbles by the time Audrey had made up her mind to say it.

“Rust?”

“Mm.”

“Can I ask you something?”

He looked over at her. Nodded.

“Are you… and my dad…?”

A loose rattle of fresh air pulled in over his teeth. He kept nodding.

“Yeah,” he said.

“So you are…?”

“Together? Yeah. We are.”

And the edges of a faint, gentle smile were pulling at the crow’s feet in the corners of his eyes when he looked back. She nodded back at him.

“I thought so,” she said, and a mirror smile broke out across her face. His grew. “I knew it, I… _Good_.”

“Good,” he agreed.

“Good,” she repeated, and now she could see his teeth. Big, white, square teeth. Like Chiclets. Or stars. She wanted to take a picture, almost. She couldn’t remember seeing him smile, really smile, before. Ever.

There was warmth growing up inside of her in contrast to the cold air of the dark around them.

“You wanna smoke another bowl?”

To her surprise, he agreed almost instantly. “Yeah.”

There was a Ziploc bag in the pocket of her sweatshirt and she took it out now, rapping the ashes out onto the grass and mixing them into the dirt with her fingers. Rust watched her re-pack it, his eyes critical and approving.

“You’re practiced at this.”

“I… yeah.”

“That need to be a cause of my concern?”

She glanced up at him. “Not really.”

“Hey, Audrey?”

“Rust.”

“I don’t give two solitary shits how much pot you smoke, but don’t you fucking dare do anything else.”

“I don’t.”

She looked at him steadily. He looked back.

“Make me a promise you won’t.”

“Don’t worry,” she told him. “I promise.”

“Good,” he said. “Now let me light you.”

And he did.

 

It was nearly three in the morning by the time Rust drifted back into the bedroom where he was meant to be sleeping. He found Marty still breathing heavy and soft, peaceful as the waves licking against a shore, tucked up warm in between the blankets. Rust crossed the floor slowly, and then crawled up into bed beside him, his feet still cold and dewy from the lawn. He folded his head into the space between Marty’s shoulderblades, curled up his legs against the undersides of his thighs, ran a hand down over his torso, felt the breathing chest, the full stomach, the warm skin. Marty felt like everything good in the world.

And when he stirred, Rust was already half-asleep, stunned dumb with softness and dark and quiet and love.

“Hey, darlin’,” Marty murmured, sleepy.

Rust took a minute to respond.

“Hey.”

“Whatcha doin’?”

“Sleeping,” said Rust, and then he was.

 

Maggie found them accidentally in the morning, the door of the bedroom still open where Rust had forgotten to shut it. She looked at them, curled there up into one another, both snoring lightly. She inhaled deep, and sighed. Then, shaking her head, the smallest of smiles in her eyes, she closed the door. Neither of them was ever any the wiser for years after.


	8. C'mon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is for the Holiday Challenge at truedetectiveprompts.tumblr.com, specifically this prompt: http://truedetectiveprompts.tumblr.com/post/103507192221/rust-and-marty-pick-up-a-case-in-the-middle-of
> 
> If you happen to read my notes, then you probably know by now to expect the fact that I wrote this all this morning and did not edit it one bit, so it's probably awful lol but here ya go. HAPPY FINALS MONTH :P

They’d parked their car at least an hour and a half’s walk away, probably further. Who knew.

Papania’d rung Marty’s cell nearing on a week ago, December thirteenth, told him they needed help, and Marty—as dictated by the Legend of Marty Hart he had all built up in his head—was willing to give that help. Free of charge. And Rust was a right arm in the passenger’s seat again by that point, though they hadn’t yet changed the name of the firm, so he’d tagged along. And so there they were.

They’d been tailing the perp for actual days now, somewhere up in some godforsaken part of _Pennsylvania_ , of all places, cornering him in with Papania and Gilbough on one side, Marty and Rust on the other, an ever-narrowing plane between them. They’d been doing all this when, somehow, completely out of the fucking blue, the perp seemed to have caught wind of their idea and parked badly along the side of the road in the last empty spot, hopped out, and jogged into an alleyway between two buildings, glancing behind him as he went.

Marty stared, nearly stopped the car.

“Keep going, Marty, shit, the fuck are you doing? He’s gonna see you.”

“He’s gone. What the fuck. What the _fuck_. How did he—?”

“Find a spot.”

“I’m trying, Rust. Fuck you.”

“There’s one.”

“Yeah… Goddammit. No, she’s not pulling out.”

“Circle the block.”

Marty looked over at him, running his tongue over his front teeth with narrowed eyes.

“Why don’t you call Gilbough,” he said. “And tell him what happened.”

“Give me the phone.”

They managed to find a spot eventually, but they wound up on an even busier street somewhere blocks away from where they’d lost him. Marty fed the meter while Rust stood back, squinting around impatiently, warily, with hands on his hips and lips tight over his teeth, getting jostled by shoppers in pom-pom hats. He looked so out of place that when Marty looked back he almost laughed aloud, and would have, had the situation not been so grave. Rust Cohle, tall, mustachioed, and gaunt, in his blue jeans and button-down shirt, blue eyes drawn up like steel, standing there on the sidewalk amidst a swarm of Christmas shoppers in their colorful coats, with their smiling faces and woolen boots and cups of Starbucks and face-paced walk. He looked washed-out, fake, like someone had cut out a segment of an old western and plastered it badly into the fabric of New Hope, Pennsylvania five days before Christmas.

Marty wanted to tell him this, joke about him sticking out like a sore thumb, but all that came out of his mouth when he opened it was, “Jesus fucking Christ, how can it possibly be this cold?”

“C’mon,” Rust said, by way of response, shoved his hands in his pockets, gestured with his head to follow, and started walking. And Marty made a grimace as he deliberated for a second, then tucked his own hands under his armpits and, grudgingly, followed.

The toes of his leather boat shoes were soaked through inside of a minute with the gray-colored water leaking out onto the sidewalk and the roads from the slush that was piled up seemingly two-feet-deep around the edges of everything. The wind bit in through the holes of his sweater. Rust seemed to hardly feel it. They kept walking: Rust striding, Marty trudging and shivering with his head down.

When the got to the alleyway where the perp had disappeared, Rust stopped. Marty nearly plowed right into him.

“Why don’t you call Gilbough, see if they turned anything up on the other side.”

“A’right.” Marty unclenched his arms from where they were wrapped around him and fumbling into the pockets of his jeans for the cellphone. His expression grew slowly more confused. He checked his back pockets. He check the front pockets again. “Shit. Think I left it in the car.”

But Rust wasn’t listening. He was gazing off intently at a point somewhere over Marty’s shoulder.

“Marty,” he said, and then he was off again, Marty hurrying in his wake with his hands pressed under his armpits again.

Rust skidded to a halt when they came up to the light at the end of the street. He glanced around.

“What?” Marty asked softly into his ear, looking around too. “J’you see him?”

And then Rust was off again like a hound on the scent, growling, “This way,” over his shoulder.

They walked. And they walked. And they walked. Until Marty resigned himself to shivering uncontrollably and uncrossed his arms, un-tensed his body, and just went on walking, trying not to wince at the wind stinging his cheeks, numbing his hands.

They stopped again what seemed like almost an hour later, on the edge of a little bridge under which no water ran, only long, grey sheets of ice. Rust came to a steady, cautious halt. And Marty, finally, saw him, their perp, up ahead, walking along with his hands in the pockets of his coat, alone on the street over the bridge. His shadow lengthened, then shortened, lengthened, then shortened, as he crossed under the streetlights. Night had fallen, somehow, before Marty had even noticed it, quicker than someone dropping a curtain. And they were alone, except for the figure up ahead. The figure who was just now turning his head to—

Rust turned and took Marty by his waist, pulled him solidly up against him so hard it might have left a bruise, knocked their mouths together. He shoved them around, pushed Marty up against the wall of the bridge, slipped a hand up over the back of his head, entangled it in what was left of his hair. And he had his tongue nearly down Marty’s throat by the time he broke apart. He slipped his cold hand into Marty’s.

“C’mon,” he said, and pulled him forward into a brisk stroll.

Marty, dazed, followed.

They followed the perp casually, Rust occasionally pulling off the side to point into the window of a lit shop, smiling under the light of an awning, saying something quiet enough that only Marty could hear: pointing at a nativity set and nodding, grinning, muttering, “Think he’s turning left.”

Their cover had an expiration date, they both knew, and eventually Rust was peering in the window of a spice shop, whispering, “Think we’re close enough. Call Gilbough.”

“I can’t,” Marty told him. “I left the phone in the car.”

Rust took his eyes off of the street up ahead for the first time in what might have been two hours. Bits of blue bored into Marty’s face, disbelieving.

“What.”

“I told you this already, you moron. I thought you had a plan.”

“Nah. Nah, my plan was to call Gilbough.”

“Well, we ain’t calling Gilbough. So think of something else.”

“Goddammit. Goddammit. I don’t know, Marty. I thought you had the fucking phone.”

“I specifically told you that I didn’t.”

“I didn’t hear you. What the fuck were you thinking we were doing? Why didn’t you stop me?”

“Jesus Christ… You said to follow you!”

“So… what? You just do what I say without questioning it now? Since when is this? You know how many of your fucking dishes I pick up at home—”

“Shit,” Marty said suddenly, soft and low, and terror crawled up Rust’s chest when he saw Marty’s eyes looking past him.

Rust turned.

The perp was gone.

“C’mon,” he said, started running.

Marty thought for a moment about calling him back, telling him it was a goddamned stupid thing to do, but before his brain had made up its mind, his soaked-through shoes were already following in Rust’s tracks.

They ran. And they kept running. And Marty might’ve been using the treadmill at the gym across the street every day at home, might’ve been trying to eat right and all that, might’ve cut it out with the beer once Rust had but, shit, alright, there was a difference between jogging indoors in your sneakers at a bright-colored gym in Louisiana and chasing down some criminal on an unfamiliar street in the dark and the cold and the snow—now falling, Jesus fuck—with Rust Cohle, Bionic Man, in the lead. Damn it, if Marty could wring out half that man’s natural drive while in bed…

Buildings streamed past. Traffic lights. A few strangling shoppers. Lights in the windows. Houses: big, old, colorful ones. A river. At one point, they went over a bridge. Maybe another.

Marty stopped being cold after a while, the rhythmic pounding of his feet and heart and clouding breath lulling him. He just kept on. And, eventually, he wasn’t tired anymore either.

 

Rust stopped. Marty stopped. It took him a minute to notice that they had. He was standing in the middle of a field somewhere, and the snow was up to his ankles, cold and wet and humming.

“Fuck,” Rust was saying, over and over again. “Fuck.”

Marty didn’t say anything.

“I don’t know where he went. We’ve lost him. We lost him. Fuck.”

Marty sat down. Sat right down in the snow. Or maybe he fell. It didn’t matter much. He lay back into it, and let the back of his head sink down into it. Snowflakes pattered down on his face.

“You… are so fucking stupid, Rust,” he panted. “So fucking stupid.”

“Ah, c’mon, Marty. Get up.”

Marty didn’t get up.

“Where the fuck are we?” he asked instead.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

“I don’t.”

“Great,” said Marty. “That’s just fucking peachy, Rust.”

There was a short silence. Marty stared up at the sky, black and moonless and blank with invisible clouds. The snow kept falling, his face thick with it now.

“C’mon, man. We gotta find somewhere that has a phone.”

“Fucking hell.”

“C’mon.” And Rust was standing over him now in the almost complete darkness, rapping him on the chest with a hand that he was meant to take. Marty took it, found that it was impossibly cold. It slipped directly out of his when he tried to hold it while getting to his feet.

“Shit,” said Rust. “Sorry.”

“S’okay. I’m up.” Marty found the hand again, wrapped his own as best as he could around it. “Fuck. Fuck. You’re freezing.”

“I’m fine. Let’s go.”

And they started walking, pressed to one another’s sides as the wind blew around them, and the snow kept falling, Rust in his button-down shirt and Marty in his loose-knit sweater, their shoes filled up with water, or snow, or feet, maybe.

“How do you know which direction we should go?”

“I don’t.”

“Remind me again why I keep following you places.”

“Because I start moving first, Marty. I’d just as readily follow you.”

“Huh.” Marty thought about it for a minute, then grinned. “Well, I guess you’re right. That’s sorta nice, ain’t it?”

“Yeah. It is. But don’t get all sentimental on me now.”

They walked until they saw a light up ahead. And then they started running again, their numb hands still interlocked. To keep warm. But when they crashed through the underbrush of a small strip of woods and came out into the field where the light shown, they found that they were just standing in the middle of a graveyard where a lonely lamp shone down on the name carved in the front of a mausoleum. The snow was climbing steadily up to their calves now, their jeans soaked through.

They looked at one another in the light from the grave. Marty’s whole face was blotchy with patches of bright red and porcelain. Rust had small icicles dangling from the fringe of his mustache. Both of their jaws were clattering in rhythm with the wind whipping snow up into their eyes.

“Where are we?” Marty asked hopelessly.

“I don’t know. I don’t see any other lights around. Can’t be more than six p.m., though.”

“So no buildings.”

“Not that I can tell.”

“We still even in New Hope?”

“No, we crossed over the bridge, remember?”

Marty stared at him.

“So we’re not even in New Hope.”

“No.”

“What the fuck were—you know what? Nope. Not even gonna say it.”

“Good on you.”

They looked at the little light over the grave again for a long moment. Rust put his other hand over Marty’s.

“Reckon it, uh… it might be your turn to think up a plan.”

Marty shot him a look.

“Got one already,” he said. “C’mon.”

And he let go of Rust’s hand. He took one step forward under the light of the mausoleum’s lamp, untangled a browned bit of wire from the handle of its door, kicked away a good bit of snow from in front of it, and looked back. Rust was nodding at him. Marty turned back and pulled the marble slot open.

He was met with darkness, with a breath of stale, warmer air rushing over his nose and mouth. He grit his teeth and ducked his head and stepped inside. Rust was right behind him.

An outline of a little bench on the opposite wall, a fast-scuttling thing moving across the floor, and three coffins settled in slots along the walls, one slot on the right still empty, still waiting. And then Rust pulled the door shut behind him and the light was closed out, and the sound of the wind howling went silent against the marble.

“Shit,” Marty said, stumbling backwards into Rust, reaching for his arm in the dark. His voice was loud in the little space. “Shit, this is fucking creepy.”

“Nah,” Rust said. “Dead people ain’t so bad. It’s the living ones you gotta watch out for.”

And Marty laughed at that, really laughed, a sound of combined relief and nervousness spilling from deep inside of him even though Rust hadn’t meant it as a joke. It was just Rust. So Rust. And they were okay now. When he turned, running the palms of his numb hands over Rust’s biceps, Rust found his mouth with his own instinctively. They were both still shivering, but at least there was no snow.

“Hey,” said Marty, leading him over by feel to the other side of the tiny room, finding the hard stone bench and sitting down on it. “I got a question for you.”

Rust sat down next to him.

“Yeah.”

“You know earlier, when you, y’know… kissed me because he was turning around? Well… you know, why’d you start using tongue on me? He couldn’t see you.”

Rust snorted. “Is this a real question? Or you just telling me to use more tongue in the future?”

There was a short silence. And then Marty gave a nervous laugh.

“A’right,” he said. “You got me.”

“Mm,” Rust hummed, exhaling into his cold hands. “Well, I can live with that.”

And he took those hands, and put one on Marty’s waist, and one on Marty’s cheek, and before Marty even knew what was happening, Rust was straddling him right there on the mausoleum bench, knocking his head back into the cold marble with thrust of his hips and a tilt of his head sideways and down—he opened his mouth and ran his tongue all the way up along the line of Marty’s throat diagonally, curled it around his earlobe when he’d finished and bit down, lightly.

“God,” Marty tried to say, but his mouth was already claimed by a pair of cold lips, by hot breath. Rust was bucking gently forward and back in his lap.

“You warming up, there, survivor?” Rust asked, all soft and gravelly, when he pulled away to start undoing the buttons on his shirt, and Marty let out a little moan in response. Rust gave a little huff of a laugh. “Good.”

His fingers were prickling now, painfully, as they defrosted, but he managed to get his button-down off, pulled Marty’s palms up over his cold chest.

“Rust,” Marty sighed, running his thumbs over the bare skin. “We’re in a fucking mausoleum.”

“Yeah.”

“So, I don’t know. What if it’s… you know, disrespectful or something?”

“Nah, man, they don’t care. They’re dead.”

Marty thought about it for a moment.

“A’right, fuck them, full sails ahead,” he said, and as soon as the words were out of his mouth, Rust unfroze and his fingers were at the hem of Marty’s sweater, tugging it up over his snow-damp skin. Splayed hands, strong and long-fingered and cold, ran down Marty chest as the sweater flopped to a corner somewhere. Their mouths crashed together. Marty’s hands settled on his belt buckle, and Rust’s groin knocked into them involuntarily, his own hands held vice-like over Marty’s thighs. A soft noise rasped up in Rust’s throat.

“God,” Marty said, pressed cheek-to-cheek with him, Rust’s forehead up against the cold marble of the wall. “You’re really rarin’ to go, aren’t you?”

A deep ache licked back up inside of Rust’s chest as made the long journey to Marty’s mouth with his own and, suddenly, he couldn’t remember how to catch his breath. He scraped their lips together, dragged his front teeth over Marty’s nose, and wound up with his mouth pressed to his eyebrow. He was quiet for a moment.

“Just hate the fucking cold, is all,” he said, quietly.

Marty couldn’t see him in the dark, but he tried to find his eyes anyway. He paused, taking his hands away from his belt to settle them on the sides of Rust’s thighs.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey, darlin’, it’s okay. We’re alright now.”

“Marty, I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to take us all the way out here. I was… Shit, I dunno. A little out of sorts, I guess.”

“It don’t matter anymore.”

“Yeah,” said Rust.

“Well, you wanna, y’know, talk about it?”

Rust snorted. And he settled his warming lips over Marty’s by way of response.

They found their rhythm again even quicker than before.

 

By morning, which was signified by a crack of morning light gracing one white-marble wall, it was almost warm in there. They lay curled together, fully clothed again besides their socks and shoes, on the bench, Rust’s face pressed into Marty’s chest, Marty’s toes curled up between Rust’s calves.

Rust was pulled awake by the sounds of crows croaking outside.

He lifted his face sleepily, nosed Marty under his chin.

“Morning.”

“Ugh.”

“Let’s head out.”

“God. Ugh. No. S’cold.”

“Gilbough and Papiana are probably trawling the river by now. We gotta go find ‘em.”

Marty groaned, and stirred, flexing out his legs like a cat without taking his arms away from Rust. Rust nosed him under the chin again, then smiled a tiny smile and leaned in to press a soft kiss to the line of his Adam’s apple.

“C’mon,” he said.

 

As it turned out, they were about a half a mile away from a road. A woman heading into town in her church clothes and sunglasses dark against the glaring snow picked them up. On the ride back to their car, they told her the truth, or most of it.


	9. January 3rd

Marty knew. Marty fucking knew, of course, and his eyes had been eggshells when Rust met them the past few days. When Rust came to bed, Marty would roll over and tangle all his limbs around him like he were trying to keep him from floating off. When Marty had to leave the house, he left the door of the closet in the bedroom conspicuously open, and the safe both open and empty. When he brought coffee out into the living room one morning, there was a stick of peppermint-flavored candy leaning against the inside of Rust’s mug (Rust loved peppermint; tasted like velvet; Marty knew). And it was getting to the point where Rust’s knuckles were wanting desperately to be split across Marty’s crooked nose—but he knew that if he said anything at all, he’d have to say everything.

So, finally, the second of January, he just told him that he was heading to the grocery store—and Marty, of course, got that look on his face like he might just get up and come along with him. But he stilled when Rust asked, quick, what kind of take-out he should bring home. Chinese? Chinese. And Marty sat back, and Rust left, and Rust didn’t bring home Chinese. He instead backed his truck out of the driveway, pulled it down the street, and turned towards the highway.

Marty was becoming protective quicksand. Wasn’t the man’s fault, really—he was just so sucked in by the sudden resurgence of hope in whole narrative of love that he was desperate not to lose that hope again—but he needed some shaking. It was for his own fucking good. You couldn’t start believing that you could shelter anybody or anything, because you couldn’t shelter anyone or anything. And Rust knew himself well, and knew that he always had a couple of toes in the doorway. He wasn’t going to be the cause of that man’s heartbreak. Neither of them were worth that.

He found himself somewhere out in the dark, on a cracked, empty highway, looking in on the lights from the city. (Close enough that they ran together like watercolors and poured down his throat in a flash of bright-cold ache), (he felt them thrumming down in his belly), (but they weren’t there, they weren’t—they were over there, far away). And he drove right on past it, around the outside, under a mess of bridges, dark water on all sides. He considered closing his eyes. They stayed open. All control of his outsides seemed to have left him, and he lay, cold and still and watching, somewhere in the very back inside corner of his body.

He drove on.

His skull was pounding at the top edges of his eyes with vague, thoughtless necessity by the time the sky started bruising up in bright orange. The needle of the gas tank had been about to crack itself on the empty symbol for about thirty miles now. He was running on empty too, and he knew this because a nasal, raspy man’s voice that he didn’t recognize had started whining, “The locusts were not allowed to kill them, the locusts were not allowed to kill them, the locusts were not allowed to kill them,” over and over again in the middle of his brain.

When the sun came over the horizon, he pulled into a gas station, got twenty dollars of gas and a pack of Camels, and then went on again.

He knew the way from there like a starved lab rat knows the way to the center of a maze. He took it slow, watching the town drift past: the church that Claire had dragged him to; the store where they’d gotten their film developed, its sign now replaced; the little library with its blue glass windows. The sky overhead was blossoming with peachy gold. His heart was up in his throat by his uvula, nausea snaking in his stomach.

And then the street came up. He turned right, and then there was the house.

A small, shuddering laugh wracked his airless chest—they’d painted it green. It now sat like an enormous, hulking cartoon frog in between its neighbors, windows drawn with blue blinds. But the mailbox was, improbably, the still same after all these years: black and boxy and now covered in corrosion, but still there. Rust had installed it himself.

There was a weather-beaten For Sale sign jabbed into the lawn in front of it. He put his foot on the gas before he could start wondering too hard about that.

Like in a dream, he made the right turn at the end of the street without pressing the brake at the stop sign, went around the back of the block to the church parking lot, and pulled in. He found a spot with the nose up against the cold brick wall that sheltered the little graveyard.

Then he turned the car off and stayed for a moment in the semi-darkness under the chestnut trees, staring hard at that brick wall. It didn’t bend or leap out at him or shed little blue stars. It just sat there. Everything was too real here.

He was suddenly aware that he desperately had to take a piss, and that his insides were scratched all raw by hunger, and that his eyes felt like shriveled grapes in his skull with sleeplessness.

So, mechanically, he swung open the protesting car door, climbed down with unfamiliarly weary stiffness in his bones, shut it and locked it. The parking lot was empty except for two cars, and he crossed it slowly and entered the church through the back door.

The lights were all off, but the linoleum tiles gleamed in the sunrise coming through the windows. He shut the door with a gentle click behind him and went to where he knew the men’s room to be, following footsteps of ghosts from more than two decades ago. He ran into nobody on the way in, but when he’d finished, he came out with his eyelashes matted from washing his face and his hair tied back more cohesively, and nearly collided with none other than the priest. Father Tom, Rust knew immediately, and was just as instantly bemused with himself for remembering the fucker’s name. Father Tom, twenty-three years older, in his black clerics, a pair of wire-rimmed glasses on the edge of his nose.

“Oh,” the Father said, blinking—whether with surprise at seeing anyone, or with surprise at seeing someone as worn-down as he was, Rust couldn’t tell. But it wasn’t recognition. “Good morning, son.”

“Morning.” Rust very intentionally left out the “Father”. Also the “good”. And Tom’s face grew almost wary.

“Can I help you?”

“No,” Rust said. “My daughter’s body is buried out back. I’m here to see her gravestone and a pile of dirt. Really don’t need your help for that.”

A clearing of sudden understanding opened up over the priest’s face as Rust brushed past him on his way to the back door again.

“Cohle,” he said. “Sophia Cohle.”

And Rust, as he turned back, wanted more than most things to bloody the motherfucker’s mouth (and nose, and eyes, and cheeks, and the back of his head) for saying her name, but he didn’t. He just gave a single dip of his head as a nod. The priest nodded back, slowly, his eyes creasing up as he thought.

“Been a long time since I seen you, son,” he said, after a pause.

“Yeah,” said Rust, turning around again, and pushing through the door. “Let’s do this again sometime.”

And he slammed it on his way out.

He made his way out into the graveyard with a vicious humming in his chest like a hive of bees who’ve been recently, lightly disturbed. Not to the point of swarming. But readying themselves. The air had a soft chill in it under the shade of the chestnut trees. There was moss on the brick wall, and he ran two fingers over it as he pushed open the knee-high gate and stepped through the opening.

The little graveyard was crumbly and green-lit and familiar in the same soft way that any old, white-snouted golden retriever is familiar. Her stone was at the back, small and white and shaped almost like a little loaf of bread set in the grass: Sophia Cohle, 1987-1989. He saw it in his head before he saw it, and when it was in front of him, he didn’t want to look.

He sank down on that little patch of grass right away, down on his knees like a prayer. He smoothed it over with his hands where it grew thick and green. He tried not to think about the tiny, tiny bones in the dirt beneath him. He shut his eyes tight, curled his head forward into his chest like he might be sick.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey, sweetheart.”

And then he couldn’t say anything more. There were sobs coming up from his guts, wracking his shoulders, shivering over his lips. Cold, wet, tickling things were sliding down the sides of his nose. And he let himself cry; he didn’t even try for dignity. He figured she deserved that. She deserved better than what he’d been allowing her—no, that wasn’t right. That wasn’t fucking true. That way of thinking, he’d come to realize, or just to feel, was all narcissism. It had nothing to do with him. Nothing. He just loved her.

He sat like that for what might have been an hour or even two, running his hands through the grass until his sobs became soft little wails, and then quieted to sniffling, and then became nothing at all. He breathed. In and out. His tired eyes drifted, finally, forward.

Sophia Cohle, 1987-1989

He set a hand on it, smoothed his thumb over the softness of the letters, back and forth.

“Still love my girl as much as always,” he said to the stone.

And then he nodded once, took a deep, shaky inhale, got up, and left.

 

Marty nearly tripped over the coffee table getting to the door when he heard Rust’s truck pull up outside. He came crashing outside right as it settled into park and Rust turned the key in the ignition.

“ _YOU MOTHERFUCKING SON OF A BITCH YOU FUCKING SON OF A HOLY MOTHERFUCKING I FUCKING THOUGHT YOU WERE DEAD YOU SHIT YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT I THOUGHT—”_

“Let me out.”

“FUCK YOU.”

“Marty, let me out of my truck.”

“ _Holy_ … Holy… Rust. Oh my God. Oh my fucking God, Rust. Rust.”

There were suddenly tears on his neck, arms wrapped so tight around him that his ribs felt like they were bending. Marty’s sobs were muffled against his shoulder.

“You fucking piece of shit, you fucking piece of shit, I love you so much, holy shit, you stupid asshole. Jesus fucking Christ.”

A familiar hand settled in the small of Marty’s back.

“Alright,” Rust said. “Stop crying.”

“Where the fuck were you?” Marty whimpered. “Where the fuck did you go? I thought you were dead. Holy fuck.”

“I ain’t dead.”

“Where _were_ you, though?”

Rust stepped back a little, knocked Marty gently on the hip with the palm of his hand, bloodshot eyes searching bloodshot eyes.

“Went to go visit my daughter.”

Marty looked at him. He said nothing for a long minute. Then he sighed, gave a short nod, glanced away.

“Come on inside now,” he said. “Please.”

 

They both slept well into the afternoon of the next day.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and now back to our regularly-scheduled fluff

He wouldn’t have done it, of course, but sometimes Marty thought about writing down all of Rust’s small, unconscious habits. The way he rubbed the pads of his fingers and thumb together when someone or something was right on the verge of pissing him off, like if he put enough friction into it he could work the frustration right out of his insides. How he’d borrow Marty’s sweatshirts without asking, take them right out of the dirty laundry pile and put them on, and then chew up the drawstrings just like a kid might have. How he could walk around naked for hours after a shower, not bothering with a towel, and yet that, in the heat of a less casual moment, unbuttoning his fly would spark up nervous tension in his shoulders, make the muscles along the inside corners of his eyes twitch. How he could put half a bottle of hot sauce in his eggs and still shake his head when he tasted them—“Need some real fucking peppers.” How he never bought peppers.

There were thousands of them, little things that made Rust Rust. This Rust. His Rust. And there was a vague sort of terror in that for Marty, when he thought about it too hard. What if he woke up one morning and discovered that Rust no longer smelled the bar of soap and closed his eyes and gave a little nod before rubbing it on his palms? Or—almost unthinkable—what if _something happened_ , and Marty no longer needed to tie little knots in the ends of the drawstrings of his sweatshirts? Well, Marty knew he’d just keep tying them anyway. The thought nearly drew enough tears onto his bottom eyelid to have them spill over.

It was one of those afternoons—late into one of those afternoons where Rust was sitting out on the doorstep with a pen working endlessly in his hand and the plastic of second pack of Camels already balled up beside him, morning having been spent with the heels of his hands pressed into his eyes—when Marty came and sat down on the doorstep next to him, having been thinking about all of this, and offered him a glass with something thick and brownish at the bottom.

“The fuck is this?” He said it without looking up from the ledger, right hand still working, left hand trailing wisps of white smoke as he took the glass.

“Peanut butter and banana smoothie. Made one for myself and made too much by mistake.”

Rust grunted, but he let his pen clatter down and roll to the binding, and then took a sip. Marty watched—and that was another thing, he realized, watching Rust’s Adam’s apple jump: if something _did_ happen, how could he replace _this?_ It’d taken a split second to flip Marty’s entire perspective. Just that one second on the floor by the altar, watching shaking fingers slip on the handle of a knife and knowing exactly, _exactly,_ what the fucker was doing, not registering it quickly enough to stop him. And now they were here: Marty making too much smoothie, and Rust taking it even though he knew full well Marty hadn’t measured a damn thing wrong.

Rust clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth and nodded, setting down the glass.

“S’good.”

“Mm. What’re you drawing?”

The smallest of laughs turned up one corner of Rust’s mouth, and he made a little gesture with his chin and tilted the ledger so Marty could see the page.

It was him.

Marty, with concentration lines creased up in between his eyebrows and up into his forehead, corners of his mouth angled downwards, head tilted and his elbows propped up on a table somewhere. He had one huge-fingered hand raised, the creases all in the right places, the fingernails chewed up, and was knocking Splenda into his coffee from a packet.

“You never tear the edge off all the way when you open one of them,” Rust told him, giving his little snort of a half-laugh again. “And you leave ‘em all over the table. Fucking annoying but… shit, I don’t know.”


	11. Chapter 11

Wake up cold. Rekindle the fire. Watch it snap and hiss back to life. Make flour, water, salt into one small, hand-shaped lump on the shelf in the fireplace. Eat, when it was browned; have some gin to push aside the steady ache in your head and muscles. Check the traps; reset them; bring in the stiff bodies of martens or minks or little shrews to thaw out by the fire. Clear snow off the roof with a long, bent branch. Shut the door when night fell at four; light the candles. Warm your hands. Start back on the gin. Start a pot boiling on the hook in the back of the fireplace. Skin the thawed-out bodies; drop their scarce meat into the water piece by piece; throw the bones far out into the woods, away from the cabin. Eat standing up when the meat was half-cooked, fast and ravenous as a vulture; drink. Stretch out as a long mass of tired bones on a nest of blankets by the hearth. Wait until the sun rose again. Repeat.

On the fishing boats it’d been harder, but at least there’d been food. At least there’d be something other than the deathly silence. Sometimes his pop’s old taxidermy hares, collecting dust, had started to look almost edible in those last few months; most of the reason why Rust’d come back when he had was just that. He’d been out of work too long. And once he’d realized that, and decided he just wasn’t getting back on another fucking boat out in the middle of the ocean in nowhere, he’d packed a backpack, put gasoline in his tank, and left. He drove for two days like a bat out of hell.

The first thing he did when he’d gotten back over the border was to stop in to a McDonalds and order two double cheeseburgers with bacon, fries, and vanilla milkshake.

“So lemme get this straight,” Marty said, a disbelieving laugh in his throat. Rust was sitting on the other side of the kitchen table, having been interrupted at the end of this narrative. “You came back all the way from fucking Alaska because you were _hungry?_ ”

“What? Why’s that so hard to believe?” Rust said, a little annoyed. “You never gone hungry before?”

Marty scrunched up his face, thinking. “That’s not my point. I’m tryina say… couldn’t you’ve just walked into town and gotten something to eat? You had money, or at some. Enough to rent an apartment when you got here. Why’d you have to drive all the way back to the fucking mainland?”

“’Cause if I’d’ve started doing that—or, you know, if I’d’ve waited much longer there, even—I wouldn’t’ve had the money to come back if I’d wanted to. Least not for another couple’a years. Savings were running out.”

“So you figured—”

“I figured, fuck it, I was gonna go back somewhere where I wouldn’t mind being stuck,” Rust said, and flicked his eyes up temporarily at Marty before returning them to his cheeseburger. He took a huge bite, and let his eyelids drop shut as he chewed.

“Too cold up there?” Marty asked, smiling a little as he watched him.

“Mm.” Rust shook his head. “Something like that.”


	12. Chapter 12

There was that space between a dream and waking when you weren’t quite human yet, when all your ectoplasm hadn’t yet been drawn back through your open mouth, when the sounds of long-dead laughter were just as real as the humming of the radiator and of the slow roll of Marty’s breath, and it was in this space that Rust wished he could have remained. With both this life and that one, and nothing that had happened in the in-between. No endings or beginnings.

When he rolled over, though, Marty was there, and that was still good enough. Still a billion parts better than any of the more foreseeable paths he’d imagined.

Rust’s eyes hadn’t drawn fully open yet, hadn’t shaken off the fuzziness of that familiar dream, but he was already pulling open the side table drawer, slowly, hearing its soft rattle against the frame. The sketchbook was heavy in his half-asleep fingers as he picked it up, settled it in his lap. He fumbled for the pencil. Silently, he flipped it open, turned through page after page: all the same, all different. He settled back when he found a blank one, and took a glance over at the warm shape to his right. A twitch curled up, briefly, along one corner of his mouth, settling in the crooks of his eyes and lingering for a moment before he began.

It was a half hour until he closed the book, set it back in the drawer, and got up to pad into the kitchen, a cloud of loose-fitting sweatshirt unzipped over a bare chest, all sharp angles and socked feet and boxers. He filled the tea kettle and plugged it into the wall to boil. He dropped down in a chair, shook out a cigarette from the pack in the middle of the table, and sat smoking with his feet up on it, ankles crossed. He watched the steam and smoke mingle over at the window, lit with the faint watercolors of early morning. Silence but for Marty’s deep, sleeping breaths in the bedroom just down the hall. Nothing sitting in Rust’s chest but a vague fullness that he’d only recently found the name for: this was calm. This was peace.

The tea kettle clicked itself off just as he stubbed out his cigarette into the ashtray on the table. He hauled up his body and pawed through the drawer to find a teabag. Constant Comment, specifically—that orange-rind shit Marty’d taken to making him during those rougher patches. Rust didn’t like to dwell on the psychological implications of having become so particularly attached to it that it’d begun to replace his endless mugs of coffee; he just shut the drawer and tore open the package and made his fucking fruit tea.

He sat, sipping it and smoking with his eyelids drooped shut, until he heard the telltale grunt and the squeak of the mattress, the sound of sleep-stunned feet coming trooping on down the hall. And by the time he opened his eyes, Marty was standing there with the pantry door open and his back to Rust, scratching his head, the hair on one arm gleaming in a sliver of light from the window.

“Reckon I should stop eating these things.” The crinkling of the package of a Pop Tart—the smell of the inside of an empty drawer that hasn’t been used in a long time creeping around the back of Rust’s brain.

“Make you some eggs.”

“Said I should; not that I was _going_ to.”

“Mmm.”

Marty pressed down the slots in the toaster and leaned back against the counter to look at him, a little smirk riding up the corners of his mouth. Rust peeled open his tired eyes looked back, eyebrows half-raised, lids sleepy—

Marty was holding his sketchbook. The spine was resting in his palm, front cover on the verge of being tipped open for a look inside.

“Where’d you get that?” Rust asked, jutting his chin at it, casually. Marty didn’t glance up.

“Oh, the drawer was open and I spotted it. This an old one?” And the cover fell open.

There was Marty, two of him, one on each side of the spread, both dated. Marty, his back covered by a folded expanse of blanket, the curve of his haunch, the twist of his shoulder, the gentle plane of his side, and the back of his head. Marty, his face in the second one, his eyebrows twisted up in dreaming consternation, his mouth half-open, his crooked nose pressed into the softness of a pillow.

Marty, the real Marty, blinked. He flipped the page. He flipped another.

“Fuck,” he said.

Rust wasn’t flushed—he was not, of course he wasn’t—and he snorted into his tea, stubbing his cigarette out.

“Just a little—” He cleared his throat. “—you know, just something I do to wake up.”

Marty glanced up at him. His eyes were bewildered, embarrassed, but his mouth was trying very, very hard not to curl up into a smile when he looked back down at the pages. He kept flipping.

“Why are you drawing me sleeping?”

Rust grunted. A little chuckle was working its way out of Marty’s throat.

“This is a fuckin invasion of privacy, you know?”

“Well, what. You want me to burn them or something?”

“No fuckin way. I’m keeping these. Shit. I look like a fuckin… like, Rembrandt shit.” Marty got to the last one, the one from this morning, and shook his head, laughing now. “Hey, Rust, paint me like one of your French girls.”

“My what now?”

Marty ignored him; he was grinning wide at the last drawing.

“Christ. This is… this is too fuckin weird.” He snapped the book shut as the toaster popped up behind him. “Never gonna be able to sleep now, knowing you’re sitting there watching me.”

“Sketch all the time while you’re awake,” Rust told him, reaching for the pack of cigarettes again. “Ain’t so different.”

“Mm.” Marty pulled his chair out and sat down, setting the ledger between them and his plate in front of him. “No, guess not.”

Rust reached over as he closed his lighter, opened the book and found his gaze caught on the dip between Marty’s shoulder-blades as he lay curled, shirtless.

“And anyway,” Rust said, exhaling smoke up to the ceiling light, “you look fucking good in all these.”


	13. Chapter 13

“This is… huh. Rust, come look at this shit.”

Marty’s reading glasses were down on the bridge of his nose, reflecting back tiny squares of light from the laptop settled on his knee. A voice, muffled with toothpaste, muttered something back from the bathroom, and it was a minute before Rust was wiping his hands on the towel, padding his way down the carpeted hall in bare feet. He arrived at Marty’s elbow.

“What am I looking at?”

“This fucking… What color is this dress?”

Rust’s eyes, fixed on the laptop, narrowed as Marty glanced up at him. He looked at Marty, then back at the laptop. He sucked on his front teeth.

“What, this a fucking trick question or something?”

“Nah, nah.” Marty shook his head, took his glasses off. He leaned back into the couch with an arm splayed out over the back. “Just tell me what color it is.”

“Dark blue. Black lace. Why are—”

Marty exploded.

“You see _blue?_ You see fuckin blue. _”_

A wariness came over Rust’s eyes, widening. He tilted his head, looked at Marty through the sides of his eyes.

“What, you think it’s purple or something? Guess I could concede indigo—”

“No, _no_ , Jesus Christ, it’s fucking _white_. It’s white, Rust. With gold fucking lace. How do you not… How are you not seeing this?”

Rust squinted back down at the screen. A little laugh huffed out of his open mouth.

“If you think that’s gold, we oughtta take you down to the Walmart and get your vision checked out sometime.”

“I think maybe we oughtta check _yours_.”

“Now, I ain’t the one with those little turtleshell glasses,” Rust said, a little archly, before he rapped the doorframe once and disappeared back into the hall. Marty could hear him turn on the faucet again in the bathroom a moment later.

“Yep, alright, I see, you got vision like a fuckin hawk,” Marty called over his shoulder. “Y’know, who’s the one who almost made me crash the other day ‘cause he thought he saw a fucking _asteroid_ fall out of the sky into the road?”

“Marty, this ain’t even the same organ we’re talking about now.” His voice was full of toothpaste again.

Marty made a little sound in his throat, like a dog that’s dropped a tennis ball at someone’s feet and is waiting for them to pick it up. He turned back to his laptop and snapped it shut, sat there shaking his head for a minute.

“Think I fuckin know white from blue,” he said, under his breath, as he got up and followed Rust into the bathroom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> im still so confused


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> short coma flashback :) just because i went through a drive-through carwash yesterday

Hell kind of reminded him of being inside a drive-through carwash. There was a rushing sound, a whirring, or humming, or fluttering, not very far away, like the wings of something huge waking up from a long nap in the dark—a steady rhythm like breath or a machine from up ahead, to his sides. It was dark, very dark, but he could make out a few muffled shapes. Big shapes, stirring. They passed by inches away as he was moved forward.

He was hung from a pole that passed straight through the hole ripped open in his stomach, his hands clenched around it like the hold on a mechanical bull for fear of suddenly becoming top-heavy and spinning over, upside-down. He used it to hold himself up slightly, so that the bar didn’t grate against his ribs, against the bottoms of his lungs when he was able to breath. He could feel the cold metal inside of him.

Water skimmed over the bottom, dangling halves of his feet, cold and long-stagnant—he knew by touch, the slimy film on top of it. Every so often, somethings with soft skin, moving quickly, powerfully, would slide by, brushing themselves against his toes. Loud splashes sometimes sounded up from nearby, from behind or up ahead or beside him. He couldn’t seem to place sounds anymore.

He didn’t know how long this went on before the creature grabbed him from above. It had long, spindly fingers that creaked like branches as they settled comfortably around his shoulders, tucked themselves under his armpits.

“Hello,” it said, in a high-pitched voice, and then it slowly began to pull him upward. The skin of his stomach, whatever tissues and organs and insides that were below, grew colder with the touch of the metal bar against them. Colder, briefly, and then the skin around them was stretching. Intestines being compressed. Spine scraping against the metal. He couldn’t hear anything at all anymore. Not for hours. It was hours. And hours. There were bright bursts of light flashing up from underneath his eyes.

And, then, in one, was white light.

He awoke sitting up against a tree on a gold-dappled afternoon. Birds twittering. A light breeze. And there was someone, someone warm and small and whole, sitting on his lap, head nestled up into his chest, face turned in to his body.

“Oh my God,” he said, when he woke up and saw her, felt her. “Oh my—” And then she turned her face up and looked at him and he couldn’t say anything anymore.

Her hair was still tied up in the red scrunchy with ladybugs on it. She still had on the overalls with the metal buckles, the shirt with Minnie Mouse on it, the red patent leather shoes. And when she reached up, curious, to wipe tears off his cheeks, her tiny hands still smelled like the almond soap he’d washed them with before she’d gone outside.

He kissed her forehead. He leaned the bridge of his nose down into her hair and tried not to sob, ended up laughing instead. Choked, wild laughs that wracked his shoulders.

She settled a palm on the side of his throat.

“Daddy?”

He pulled back and looked at her again, his throat so full of heart and tears that he wanted to howl. He put his two hands, dirty and shivering, on the sides of her small face, smoothed back wisps of her hair with his thumbs. Her blue eyes looked back, wondering, excitement without understanding. Those eyes. Those same eyes. His eyes. Hers.

“Hey,” he said, and swallowed down a long exhale. “Hey, sweetheart.”


	15. Chapter 15

“Watch your hand, Rust; I’m gonna burn you.”

Audrey knocks his splayed palm off the table and into his lap. Her hair is tied up at the nape of her neck in a wild bun, eyeliner a little smudged from watching the pot boil.

She drops the pot holder onto the table and sets down the boiled water, rubbing her fingers together from the heat of the handles. Then she picks up the ladle.

“You two got your food dye ready?” she asks before she dips it into the water, and Marty gives a little, “Yep,” while Rust tilts his mug towards her so she can see the drops of deep blue at the bottom.

“Alright. Move your _hands_ , Rust,” and she’s ladling the hot water into their mugs, and then into hers. The tang of vinegar pulls up into the air, makes the sides of Rust’s mouth itch. Audrey sits down across from Marty, her elbow at Rust’s, and Rust’s at Marty’s, as they stir the dye in.

“Feel like I’m in kindergarten,” Marty says as he drops his egg into the mug, peering in after it.

“Feel like I’m here,” Rust murmurs. He watches his own egg bob around like a small moon at the bottom of a deeply blue ocean as, in the corner of his eye, Marty looks up at him, squints, shakes his head, and then looks away again.

“What color are you doing, Dad?”

“Green. Green as this one’s social skills. How ‘bout you, darlin’?”

“I’m trying to do purple,” Audrey says, at the same time as Rust tells him, “Blue.”

Marty’s face flushes over, and Audrey cackles.

“Which darlin’ did you mean?” she asks, and Marty just grumbles and pokes a finger in at his egg, drawing it out fast and making a face when he remembers the water’s still hot.

“How long do we leave these things in?” he asks, wiping it on his pantleg.

“The website said as long as you want. The longer you leave them in, the darker they get.”

“Think I want mine nice and light so I can paint a lot on it.”

“Sounds good, Dad.”

“These paints’ll go right over anything you put ‘em on, Marty.”

“It won’t stand out, though.”

“…Mm.”

The water cools quickly, and soon Marty’s bobbing his egg impatiently up and down in it with an index finger. Rust watches, face turned down but eyes flicked upwards, a tiny smile curling along their edges.

“Mine’s about ready,” Marty says, picking it up out of the water, shaking it off a bit roughly into the mug, and examining it. It’s the color of the undersides of lamb’s-ear leaves.

“Looks nice, Dad.”

“You mind passing me some’a that paint?”

“Sure.”

Audrey takes hers out soon after. It’s a maroon-y shade of purple, like a fading bruise. She squeezes a dollop of acrylic paint, mint green, on one of the plastic plates she’s put out, aside some well-loved paint brushes with fine heads. She starts sketching up tiny trees from the wider base of her egg, stretches their branches to the top, where they meet. Marty’s egg is covered in blue and pink squiggles by then, fat and messy.

Rust takes his egg out when it’s so deeply blue that it hardly looks dyed; looks like it was formed that way, like a strange stone. He goes for the white paint. He makes a circle on the top, and fills it in, quickly and neatly. Then, along even intervals, he slices through the blue with straight downward strokes. They meet at the bottom.

They finish at around the same time, Audrey’s delicate minty trees and Marty’s pastel mess and Rust’s otherworldly little sun.

“How the hell’d you two get so good at this?” Marty grumbles, pushing up his glasses with the back of his wrist, his fingers covered in dye and paint.

“Yours looks great, though,” Audrey tells him, trying to keep a straight face.

Rust coughs. “Like the chicken was really fucked up on molly when she laid that thing.”

“Fuck you.”

The ghost of a smile passes over Rust’s mouth for a moment.

“Yours looks real pretty, Audrey,” he says. She holds it up and examines it, turning it around.

“Thanks. Like yours too.”

“Nobody likes mine,” Marty mopes, teasingly.

“It’s a sight to behold,” Rust tells him, pressing a darting kiss over one of Marty’s eyebrows as he stands up, pushing his chair back with his legs. “Now where’re we gonna keep these while they dry?”


	16. Chapter 16

Rust does crosswords in pen.

Marty keeps waiting for him to fuck something up, and for half the page to end up covered in black scribbles, but he never does. It isn’t that he was so great at them or anything; he just won’t write anything down until he’s absolutely positive. It takes him all day on Sundays. He’ll still have the paper folded on his knee by the time they’re sitting out back watching the sun set, still be chewing on the end of his pen with his brow knotted up.

“Marty?”

“Mm.”

“Oscar winner in ’95. Ten letters.”

“Braveheart,” Marty says, after a short pause.

And Rust, ploddingly, thoughtfully, writes it in. He scans down the list for others he hasn’t crossed off yet.

“The Peace Corp formed under him. Seven letters.”

“Are you…? Kennedy. It’s Kennedy.”

“Mm.”

Marty watches him bite the end of his pen to check that it fits. He shakes his head.

“Why d’you do those things every week, man? They drive you fucking crazy all day.”

Rust looks up at him, halfway through etching in the “E”.

“I don’t do them. We do them.”

And he returns to filling in the squares.

The sun is dropping low down over the sparse scatter of suburban trees, the color of honey. It settles, when Marty looks, in the creases of Rust’s crow’s feet, along his lips, turns his eyelashes to spun gold. He shakes his head at him again, the smallest of grins spreading on his face despite his best efforts.

“Yeah, ’cause you don’t fucking know any of the easy ones.”

“Yeah. I know all the hard ones.”

“No, you just know how many letters ‘Nietzsche’ has in it.”

“Did half this thing without you.”

“And I did the other half.”

Rust’s pen is stuck firmly in his teeth now as he looks up, tilting his head to one side in mock irritation, both hands dropped in his lap.

“Fucking told you we do it together. You just think you’re too—” He reaches for some word, twisting a hand around in the air.

“Damn right I’m too cool to do a crossword puzzle. Now gimme that thing; you dunno what you’re doing.”

Marty makes a grab at the paper, and Rust snatches it away before he can get it, holds it at arm’s length, a laugh threatening to spill out of his throat. Marty’s lawn chair creaks and he tips it up onto its two right legs, stretching over Rust’s lap to grab the paper.

“Fuck you,” Marty laughs. “Gonna stab me in the eye with the fucking pen. Hold on, on second thought—”

And he reaches up to take it out of Rust’s teeth, but he holds on like a dog playing tug-of-war.

“God _damn_ it.” He lunges for the paper.

“Uh-uh. Nope.” And Rust’s laughing now too, soft and high up in his throat.

Marty takes this opportunity to grab the pen.

“Ha! _Ha._ ”

“Shit, ain’t giving you the paper though. No good without a paper.”

“Yeah, but I’m g— _FUCK!”_

And Marty’s lawn chair tips forward, nearly sending him face-first into the grass. He makes it up before he hits, clutches at Rust’s knee, cackling now. The chair lies abandoned, overturned.

“Guess I’ll have to sit here now,” he says, when he recovers his wits, and turns around to plant himself right on Rust’s lap.

“Sh—We’re gonna break this fucking thing.”

“Nah, we ain’t… _Ha_!” And he snatches the paper from Rust’s hand, hugs it tight to his chest. “Got it. I’m like the goddamn cat burglar.”

“Mmhm?”

“Yeah.” And he settles back, leaning heavy against Rust’s chest. Rust groans a little, reaches an awkward hand up to Marty’s arm, slides it over his chest, settles it on his stomach. Marty takes it in his own and moves it onto his thigh.

“Hey. I got a four-letter word.”

“Alright.”

Marty processes that for a minute, then laughs.

“That wasn’t the one I was thinking of,” he says, “but sounds good to me.”


End file.
